G-Spot: This is the season for trying new things

After my recent foray into running for pleasure — as opposed to running through an airport to find the departure gate before it closes — I briefly tried my hand at being a cool hipster dude, like the ones I’ve seen in coffee houses, sipping exotic warm drinks, while typing on their laptops.

My transformation into a hipster came as a result of having recently moved house and waiting for the company that provides our Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (I just found out that is what ADSL stands for) to move our account from the one address to the new one.

This should have been a fairly simple process, and one would have thought as they were being paid for a service, they would provide it as quickly as possible. But as I write this, it has been more than a week since we moved and nearly a month since we first contacted them about helping us move our line to the new address, but still no action.

As a result, I have been forced to briefly adopt the hipster lifestyle as described above instead of working from home as usual.

However, I digress. The hipster lifestyle, as I see it, is lived by all these very trendy people who sit around cafes dressed in Yoga pants or smart, stylish tracksuits, sipping exotic sounding warm beverages with adjectives such as skinny, flat, white and latte attached to them.Previous generations knew these drinks as plain old coffee, tea or hot chocolate.

These hipsters pose confidently in their immaculately shaped beards and goatees (the men) second-hand (sorry, vintage) clothes and accessories (the women). And apparently, they manage to get work done, sipping on their coffee and nibbling on their croissants or bagels, while tapping away at their laptops, chatting with friends and taking the odd selfie.

My adapting to the lifestyle meant that I had to look for a nearby cafe that serves coffee and has a reliable Wi-Fi connection. The latter is not as easy in Cape Town as it might be in Nairobi, but in the end, I found such a place. Then came the hard part. I had to try and explain to the waitron that all I wanted was a simple black coffee. This in itself was a mission. Apparently nobody drinks plain black coffee or tea anymore, the beverage must be dressed up. So I had to settle for a double espresso.

In the end, I found it very difficult to get my work done, as I had forgotten it was school holidays and thus there were “cool” parents who had brought their noisy offspring along for a treat, which didn’t help concentration. And then there was not enough space for the food and drink plus my laptop and mouse (I abhor the trackpad). In the end, I figured that perhaps this was not the lifestyle choice for me.

Hopefully by the time you read this, normal service will have been restored by way of a home Wi-Fi connection, and I may even have shaved off my trendy hipster goatee.